DigWithin
Kevin Ryan
Since September 11, 2001, the United States has initiated a number of wars in Muslim countries. These wars, which would be more correctly called massacres, have resulted in the deaths of countless innocent Muslims. In some cases, attempts have been made to present these aggressions in the guise of humanitarian efforts to promote democracy. But the limited public support for U.S. military action around the world goes back to the U.S. government claim that Muslims were responsible for 9/11. This claim is untrue and it is past time for people to recognize that fact.
There are many ways to see that Muslims were not responsible for 9/11. Author David Ray Griffin has previously made arguments in this regard.[1] As time goes on, however, more facts lead people to realize that claims of Muslim responsibility for terrorism in the U.S. should be highly suspect. These facts include that the October 2001 anthrax attacks were blamed on Muslims only to be later traced to a U.S. military facility and to non-Muslim, U.S. scientists. Moreover, a number of FBI-planned acts of terrorism since 2001 have been falsely attributed to young Muslims who were victims of appalling acts of entrapment by the FBI.[2]
According to the official account of 9/11, nineteen young Arab Muslims were responsible for the entirety of the mass murder that day. The FBI accused these young men within 72 hours of the attacks and, although the list changed slightly at first, it has remained the same since shortly after the attacks. To support the accusations, U.S. authorities pointed to passports that were found under implausible circumstances, luggage containing unbelievably convenient documents, and other dubious evidence.
In October 2001, reporter Seymour Hersh wrote –
“Many of the investigators believe that some of the initial clues that were uncovered about the terrorists’ identities and preparations, such as flight manuals, were meant to be found. A former high-level intelligence official told me, ‘Whatever trail was left was left deliberately—for the F.B.I. to chase.’”[3]
Years later, the 9/11 Commission Report (911CR) was written by a professional myth-maker, Phillip Zelikow, who was also a Bush Administration insider. Oddly enough, the outline for the report was written by Zelikow and his colleague Ernest May even before the investigation began. It is now widely accepted that the 9/11 Commission and the FBI did very poorly in terms of investigating most aspects of the attacks. In just one example, the FBI never even interviewed the people suspected of engaging in 9/11 insider trading.[4]
Despite the poor quality of the investigation, the 911CR used inflammatory language which focused on Muslims as “the enemy.” The Commission told us that “the enemy rallies broad support in the Arab and Muslim world by demanding redress of political grievances, but its hostility toward us and our values is limitless.” The Commission was being false and misleading when it made these statements, however, as the evidence shows that 9/11 was not a Muslim crime.
Muslims do not murder innocent people
The most obvious reason that the Commission was off-track is that Muslims do not murder innocent people. Some people find this statement outrageous. Of course Muslims murder innocent people, they say, that’s what al Qaeda does.
The problem is that, as a society, many of us have been trained to accept religion as a noncommittal affiliation or label. For example, many of the current U.S. leaders have engaged in mass murder around the world over the last ten years yet they still call themselves Christians. Anyone can see that they are not. Those who truly believe in God live by the laws of the religion they proclaim and Christians do not engage in wars of aggression or the torture and killing of other human beings.
The word “Muslim” is Arabic and literally means “one who submits (to God).” But Webster’s Dictionary defines a “Muslim” as an adherent to Islam. Being an adherent of Islam means to follow the teachings of the Holy Qu’ran. And according to the Qur’an, one of the greatest sins is to kill a human being who has committed no fault:
Furthermore, polls in countries with large Muslim populations indicate that Muslims oppose the killing of civilians in warfare significantly more than non-Muslims do. People in Muslim countries “roundly reject attacks on civilians. Asked about politically-motivated attacks on civilians, such as bombings or assassinations, majorities in all countries–usually overwhelming majorities–take the strongest position offered by saying such violence cannot be justified at all.”[6]
To avoid this direct problem, some say that the alleged 9/11 hijackers were nominally Muslims. In other words, they were people who called themselves Muslims but who just didn’t follow this one requirement of the Qu’ran. This article doesn’t delve into the carefully cultivated phenomenon called “radical Islam,” but the evidence we have indicates that the men accused of hijacking planes on 9/11 were either not involved at all, or were not even close to being adherents of Islam.
The men accused of hijacking the planes were either not involved or were not Muslims
In the weeks after 9/11, many mainstream news sources reported that the accused hijackers were still alive. These claims were reported by major media sources like The Independent, the London Telegraph and the British Broadcasting Corporation. Although BBC attempted to retract the claims later, the Telegraph reported that it had interviewed some of these men, who the newspaper said had the same names, same dates of birth, same places of birth, and same occupations as the accused.[7]
No other media sources have successfully explained the discrepancies around the reports of the alleged hijackers still being alive. One particularly weak attempt, cited as the primary source at Wikipedia, was an absurd hand-waving piece in Der Spiegel that used “U.S. Historian Daniel Pipes” as the authority.[8] Not mentioned is the fact that Pipes, a second-generation neocon and Project for the New American Century signatory, is arguably the world’s leading Islamophobe.[9]
Most importantly, the “hijackers alive” reports were not investigated by the FBI or the 9/11 Commission. In fact, the Director of the FBI, Robert Mueller, publicly expressed doubts about the identity of the hijackers. Yet to this day there has been no official response to these contradictions despite their high relevance to the overall investigation.
However, we can imagine that these cases were probably the result of stolen identities and some follow-up media statements suggested just that. With the likelihood of stolen identities, and without an official investigation to clarify, we are left with the conclusion that some of the accused men were not involved. It could be that there may have been other people involved who have never been identified, but without facts to go on we cannot say.
The men who appear to have been falsely accused include the brothers Wail and Waleed al Shehri, and Abdulaziz al Omari.[10] The language in the 911CR suggests that al Omari was the most devout of the accused men, in that he “often served as an imam at his mosque in Saudi Arabia.” But since his identity was stolen and he was therefore not involved, we must look to the other accused men for Muslim connections.
Others who appear to be victims of identity theft include Mohand al Shehri, Salem al Hazmi, Saeed al Ghamdi, and Ahmed al Nami. Although the Commission’s report states that al Ghamdi “attended prayer services regularly,” he was also reported to have trained at the Lackland Air Force Base’s Defense Language Institute, which is a fact that does not support his being a religious fanatic with limitless hostility toward the United States. The report also says of al Hazmi that he was “unconcerned with religion.” In any case, these four must be excluded from the oxymoronic label of “Muslim terrorist” because it appears they were falsely accused.
Another of the accused men who the Commission says was “unconcerned with religion” was Satam al Suqami. This description appears to be correct because, according to The Boston Globe, al Saqami liked to sleep with prostitutes, which is a decidedly non-Muslim activity.[11] In Islam, prostitution and other forms of sexual deviancy are forbidden. Therefore, although al Suqami was not reported to be still alive, he was not a Muslim.
In the months and days leading up to 9/11, the alleged hijackers were reported to have drank alcohol heavily in bars, purchased pornographic materials, watched strippers, and paid for lap dances. Needless to say, people who follow the teachings of the Qu’ran (Muslims) do not do any of those things.
As Temple University professor of Islamic Studies, Mahmoud Mustafa Ayoub, said in relation to the alleged 9/11 hijackers – “Islam does not condone killing innocent people in the name of God. Nor can a devout Muslim drink booze or party at a strip club and expect to reach heaven.”[12]
Two of the men were being watched by the CIA for at least twenty months prior to 9/11. These were Nawaf al Hazmi and Khalid al Mihdhar, and they did not follow the Qu’ran either. As reported by the Los Angeles Times, these two were often seen at Cheetah’s, a nude bar in San Diego.
The most glaring examples of non-Muslim behavior, however, were exhibited by the alleged hijacker pilots of American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175. According to the 911CR, Mohammed Atta and Marwan al Shehhi piloted these airliners and crashed them into the WTC towers. Public knowledge about them indicates that they might have been trained at U.S. military facilities, but it is clear that they did not even try to follow the Qu’ran. Frankly, Phillip Zelikow is more of a Muslim than they were.
For one thing, Atta and al Shehhi were known to dress in gaudy jewelry and clothes. Because of this, people thought they were mafia characters. As author Daniel Hopsicker wrote, they wore “Gold jewelry, expensive watches, and silk shirts” and were “Not exactly a description of Islamic fundamentalists.”[13] Additionally, their activities in Florida, in the years prior to 9/11, were closely aligned with those of gunrunners and drug smugglers, which also indicates that they were anything but Muslims.
Atta’s stripper girlfriend, Amanda Keller, said that Atta and al Shehhi “had massive supplies of cocaine” which they restocked whenever needed at one of the flight schools run by Dutch nationals in Florida. Keller said that during the time she dated him, she saw Atta do cocaine himself on multiple occasions.[14] And, of course, Muslims don’t do cocaine or other illicit drugs.
Witnesses saw Al Shehhi and Atta drunk at a Hollywood, Florida sports bar. On another occasion in Palm Beach, Atta and Alshehhi were seen spending $1,000 on champagne in only 45 minutes. During the latter escapade, Atta was with a tall busty brunette and Alshehhi was with a short blonde woman. Both women were known locally as high-priced escorts.[15]
A stripper in Las Vegas, Nevada recalled that Marwan al Shehhi was “cheap,” because he paid only $20 for a lap dance. In the summer of 2001, Al Shehhi was apparently also seen in a nude bar in Pompado Beach, Florida. Six exotic dancers who worked there testified to seeing him. At the same time, both al Shehhi and Hamza Alghamdi were witnessed purchasing pornographic video and sex toys from a Florida store. The Wall Street Journal reported that Alghamdi watched a porn video in his hotel room, and others witnessed alleged hijacker Majed Moqed visiting a porn shop on several occasions in the months before 9/11.[16]
This same categorically non-Muslim behavior was also true for Ziad jarrah, the alleged hijacker pilot of Flight 93, which was destroyed in a field in Pennsylvania. Seven months before the attacks, it was noticed that Jarrah “frequented” a strip club in Jacksonville, Florida.[17]
The 911CR says that six of the alleged hijackers lived in Paterson, NJ for up to six months. This included Hani Hanjour, Nawaf al Hazmi, Khalid al Mihdhar, the man mis-identified as Abdulaziz al Omari, and others. Reports put Ziad Jarrah in Paterson as well. The mayor of Paterson, Marty Barnes, certainly noticed them and he made the point of how non-Muslim they were, saying –“Nobody ever saw them at mosques, but they liked the go-go clubs.” [18]
Given that Atta and friends were so far from being Muslims, it actually makes sense that the U.S. government would try, in the days after 9/11, to bolster the political story by adding actual Muslims to their quickly drawn-up list. The real al Omari, for example, was obviously not involved. But the discrepancy between his being an imam and a go-go club aficionado who never went to the mosques would quickly be lost in the post-9/11 clamor for revenge. And the public’s most banal and prejudiced tendencies could be better exploited with hints of Muslim connections, no matter how weak, just as they have been with the anthrax attacks and the ongoing FBI-planned terrorism.
In any case because the alleged hijacker pilots were clearly not Muslims, the deaths caused by the destruction of those planes cannot be attributed to Muslims. This includes the deaths of the airplane passengers and the people in the impact zones of the WTC.
The alleged hijackers were not responsible for most of the deaths on 9/11, if any
The 911CR says that Hani Hanjour, the accused hijacker pilot of American Airlines Flight 77, was the terrorist operation’s most experienced pilot. The official account tells us that he slammed the aircraft into the Pentagon at the first-floor level going over 500 mph. But all the evidence indicates that he was a very poor pilot at best. He repeatedly failed his training courses on single engine aircraft and according to representatives of his flight training schools he had no fundamental pilot skills.[19] Due to these facts, we know that Hanjour could not have flown the plane as alleged. So it doesn’t matter if he was a Muslim.
It is possible that all the planes were commandeered by way of existing remote control technology, which would explain a number of the unanswered questions.[20] Remote piloting could explain why the planes did not squawk the hijack code, why the auto-pilot stayed on during the hijacking process, and how these planes were flown with extreme precision at very high speeds regardless of the poor skills of the alleged pilots. It would also explain how those who planned the attacks could have remained confident of their success, despite having employed unreliable, cocaine-snorting, alcoholic perverts as “hijackers.”
Regardless of who actually flew the planes, we know that most of the deaths on 9/11 were the result of actions which could not have been accomplished by the accused men. Of course, the initial hijackings could be blamed on the alleged, non-Muslim hijackers and one might argue that some passengers and crew members were said to be killed during the hijackings. But so little is known about how the hijackings occurred that it is difficult to know what really happened. The 9/11 Commission could not even say how the alleged hijackers entered the cockpits of any of the four planes, or why the hijack code was not squawked for any of them.
If we examine what was needed to facilitate the attacks, we see that most of the deaths on 9/11 were the result of many things that should not have happened. And none of it could have been accomplished without the involvement of U.S. authorities.
It is reasonable to say, without an extensive inquiry, that Muslims could not have shut down the pre-9/11 investigations. Similarly, they could not have caused the repeated failure of a hijacking prevention system that had been successful for over 20 years. Muslims certainly could not have stopped U.S. leaders from doing their jobs on 9/11, nor could they have disabled the U.S. air defenses or shot down Flight 93.
Additionally, there is no doubt that Muslims were not to blame for delaying and obstructing the investigation into 9/11, during which time the U.S. and its allies had already initiated massacres in the Middle East. The official accounts that were finally generated, that ignored most of the important evidence and are transparently false, are not the work of Muslims either. The murder of millions of people has been falsely justified by way of those official accounts.
Muslims could not have done any of these things. Not even the drug-abusing drunk called Mohammed Atta, who dated strippers, dressed like a gangster and hung out with drug runners, could have done those things.
Moving beyond Islamophobia
We do have clues about who might have been involved though. For example, Florida Governor Jeb Bush showed up at Rudi Dekkers’ flight school in Venice, Florida where Atta and several of the other accused men had trained, within 24-hours after the attacks, to confiscate all the school’s records.[24] Curiously, Jeb and his brother, the President of the United States, had three relatives working for companies within the impact zones of the WTC towers (Craig Stapleton, Jim Pierce, and Prescott Bush Jr).[25]
Dekkers was a pervert just like the accused, non-Muslim men and he was brought up on charges for sexual harassment. Another of the many weird facts about Dekkers was that he claimed to be a New York City cop, and had a plaque on his wall with words to that effect.[26] This might remind us that Bernard Kerik, the “9/11 hero” who led the New York City Police department when it was credited with providing some of the dubious evidence against the accused, not only dressed like a gangster, he was known to have associated with mafia characters. Coincidentally, the same things were said about FBI agent and lead al Qaeda investigator, John O’Neill.
Kerik spent years working in Saudi Arabia, first for the Saudi royal family and then for one of the companies that later was located near the impact zone in the south tower. Interestingly, Kerik was the first person to tell us that explosives were not involved in the destruction of the WTC. Unfortunately, we can’t get follow-up comments from him because he’s now in prison.
There remain many avenues for further investigation into the accused hijackers and who they really were. Could there be a connection between the porn shops and strip clubs that the accused men liked to visit, and covert activities or organized crime? Could those connections lead from places like Las Vegas and Florida to New York City, and shed light on why so many mafia-linked companies were hired to clean-up the WTC site?
Could the links between Atta, Dekkers’ financier Wally Hilliard, and international drug-running have anything to do with creating a pretext for war in Afghanistan, the country that now leads the world in opium production? That certainly would make sense given that the southwest Florida area near Venice, where Dekkers, Atta and the alleged hijackers spent so much time, was home to a long history of CIA and drug trafficking operations.
Two long-time law enforcement officers interviewed by Daniel Hopsicker said they had “witnessed a 40-year long history of CIA-connected covert operations in their area.” They were describing Atta’s home port in early 2001, the Charlotte County Airport. They added that “they believed that the CIA was somehow involved, if not responsible for, the World Trade Center attacks.”[27]
Forty years is not quite right, however, as the history of covert drug operations in that area went back at least 60 years. The tiny Venice Airport, where most of the alleged hijackers trained, originated as the Venice Army Airfield and was the home of the operatives who worked for General Claire Chennault.[28] Civil Air Transport, the successor to Chennault’s Flying Tigers and the world’s largest heroin-trafficking operation at the time, transported the drugs that funded the early covert operations of the CIA, and those airmen worked closely with organized crime while doing so.[29]
For the 12 years prior to 9/11, drug trafficking and terrorist training in the Venice, Florida area was overlooked by the region’s congressional representative, former CIA operative Porter Goss, and its Senator, Bob Graham. It might not be surprising then, to notice that Goss and Graham led the first official inquiry into the 9/11 attacks. They didn’t find much.
Unfortunately, these leads are not being investigated due to continued support for the false claim that the alleged hijackers were adherents of Islam. Such support for the official conspiracy theory also promotes the ongoing Muslim genocide. We don’t know where all this falsehood will lead in the future, but people who seek the truth about 9/11 should move beyond blaming Muslims and get back to useful investigative work.
[1] David Ray Griffin, Was America Attacked by Muslims on 9/11?, information Clearing House, September 8, 2008, http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20722.htm
[2] Glenn Greenwald, The FBI again thwarts its own Terror plot, Salon, Sep 29, 2011, http://www.salon.com/2011/09/29/fbi_terror/
[3] Seymour M. Hersh, What Went Wrong, The New Yorker, October 8, 2001, http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2001/10/08/011008fa_FACT
[4] Kevin R. Ryan, Evidence for Informed Trading on the Attacks of September 11, Foreign Policy Journal, http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2010/11/18/evidence-for-informed-trading-on-the-attacks-of-september-11/
[5] Huda, Muslim Victims of 9/11 Attack: Several dozen Muslims were among the innocent victims, About.com, http://islam.about.com/od/terrorism/a/Muslim-Victims-Of-9-11-Attack.htm
[6] Program on International Policy Attitudes, Muslims Believe US Seeks to Undermine Islam, April 24, 2007, http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/articles/brmiddleeastnafricara/346.php
[7] David Harrison, Revealed: the men with stolen identities, The Telegraph, 23 Sep 2001, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/saudiarabia/1341391/Revealed-the-men-with-stolen-identities.html
[8] Der Spiegel, Panoply of the Absurd, September8, 2003, http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,265160,00.html
[9] Hillary Smith, The Main Purveyors of Islamophobia: Daniel Pipes, The Council for the National Interest, 18 January 2012, http://www.councilforthenationalinterest.org/promoting-islamophobia/the-main-purveyors-of-islamophobia/item/1336-islamophobia%E2%80%99s-main-purveyors-daniel-pipes
[10] 911Research.wtc7.com, Resurrected Hijackers: Suicide Hijackers Identified by the FBI Proclaim Their Innocence, http://911research.wtc7.net/disinfo/deceptions/identities.html
[11] Shelley Murphy and Douglas Belkin, Hijackers Said to Seek Prostitutes, The Boston Globe, October 10, 2001, http://s3.amazonaws.com/911timeline/2001/bostonglobe101001.html
[12] Jody A. Benjamin, Suspects’ actions don’t add up, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, September 16 2001, http://web.archive.org/web/20010916150533/http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/southflorida/sfl-warriors916.story
[13] Daniel Hopsicker, Welcome to Terrorland: Mohamed Atta & the 9-11 Cover-up in Florida, Trine Day; 2004
[15] History Commons Complete 9/11 Timeline, Context of ‘Before September 11, 2001: 9/11 Hijackers Drink Alcohol and Watch Strip Shows, Especially towards Eve of Attacks, http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=a091101beforepinkpony
[17] Jackelyn Barnard, Exclusive: 9/11 Hijacker Stayed at Jacksonville Hotel, First Coast News, Aug 25, 2004, http://www.firstcoastnews.com/news/local/story.aspx?storyid=23296
[18] Evan Thomas, Cracking the Terror Code, Newsweek, October 15, 2001, http://www.wanttoknow.info/011015newsweek
[19] 911Research.wtc7.net, Clueless Super-Pilot, http://911research.wtc7.net/disinfo/deceptions/badpilots.html
[20] Aidan Monaghan, Plausibility Of 9/11 Aircraft Attacks Generated By GPS-Guided Aircraft Autopilot Systems, Journal of 9/11 Studies, October 2008, http://www.journalof911studies.com/volume/2008/AutopilotSystemsMonaghan.pdf
[21] Paul Thompson, The Failure to Defend the Skies on 9/11, History Commons, http://www.historycommons.org/essay.jsp?article=essayairdefense
[22] Frank Legge, Controlled Demolition at the WTC: a Historical Examination of the Case, Journal of 9/11 Studies, May, 2009, http://www.journalof911studies.com/volume/2009/LeggeCDatWTC.pdf
[23] Kevin R. Ryan, Demolition Access to the WTC Towers, found at 911Review.com, http://911review.com/articles/ryan/demolition_access_DonPaul.html
[28] Daniel Hopsicker, The Utimate Hedge?: Venice Airport has a 60-Year History of Drug Trafficking, Mad Cow News, March 8, 2010, http://www.madcowprod.com/03082010.htm
[29] Kevin R. Ryan, Review of American War Machine, by Peter Dale Scott, 911Blogger.com, February 12, 2011, http://911blogger.com/news/2011-02-12/review-american-war-machine-peter-dale-scott
Kevin Ryan
Since September 11, 2001, the United States has initiated a number of wars in Muslim countries. These wars, which would be more correctly called massacres, have resulted in the deaths of countless innocent Muslims. In some cases, attempts have been made to present these aggressions in the guise of humanitarian efforts to promote democracy. But the limited public support for U.S. military action around the world goes back to the U.S. government claim that Muslims were responsible for 9/11. This claim is untrue and it is past time for people to recognize that fact.
There are many ways to see that Muslims were not responsible for 9/11. Author David Ray Griffin has previously made arguments in this regard.[1] As time goes on, however, more facts lead people to realize that claims of Muslim responsibility for terrorism in the U.S. should be highly suspect. These facts include that the October 2001 anthrax attacks were blamed on Muslims only to be later traced to a U.S. military facility and to non-Muslim, U.S. scientists. Moreover, a number of FBI-planned acts of terrorism since 2001 have been falsely attributed to young Muslims who were victims of appalling acts of entrapment by the FBI.[2]
According to the official account of 9/11, nineteen young Arab Muslims were responsible for the entirety of the mass murder that day. The FBI accused these young men within 72 hours of the attacks and, although the list changed slightly at first, it has remained the same since shortly after the attacks. To support the accusations, U.S. authorities pointed to passports that were found under implausible circumstances, luggage containing unbelievably convenient documents, and other dubious evidence.
In October 2001, reporter Seymour Hersh wrote –
“Many of the investigators believe that some of the initial clues that were uncovered about the terrorists’ identities and preparations, such as flight manuals, were meant to be found. A former high-level intelligence official told me, ‘Whatever trail was left was left deliberately—for the F.B.I. to chase.’”[3]
Years later, the 9/11 Commission Report (911CR) was written by a professional myth-maker, Phillip Zelikow, who was also a Bush Administration insider. Oddly enough, the outline for the report was written by Zelikow and his colleague Ernest May even before the investigation began. It is now widely accepted that the 9/11 Commission and the FBI did very poorly in terms of investigating most aspects of the attacks. In just one example, the FBI never even interviewed the people suspected of engaging in 9/11 insider trading.[4]
Despite the poor quality of the investigation, the 911CR used inflammatory language which focused on Muslims as “the enemy.” The Commission told us that “the enemy rallies broad support in the Arab and Muslim world by demanding redress of political grievances, but its hostility toward us and our values is limitless.” The Commission was being false and misleading when it made these statements, however, as the evidence shows that 9/11 was not a Muslim crime.
Muslims do not murder innocent people
The most obvious reason that the Commission was off-track is that Muslims do not murder innocent people. Some people find this statement outrageous. Of course Muslims murder innocent people, they say, that’s what al Qaeda does.
The problem is that, as a society, many of us have been trained to accept religion as a noncommittal affiliation or label. For example, many of the current U.S. leaders have engaged in mass murder around the world over the last ten years yet they still call themselves Christians. Anyone can see that they are not. Those who truly believe in God live by the laws of the religion they proclaim and Christians do not engage in wars of aggression or the torture and killing of other human beings.
The word “Muslim” is Arabic and literally means “one who submits (to God).” But Webster’s Dictionary defines a “Muslim” as an adherent to Islam. Being an adherent of Islam means to follow the teachings of the Holy Qu’ran. And according to the Qur’an, one of the greatest sins is to kill a human being who has committed no fault:
- If someone kills another person – unless it is in retaliation for someone else or for causing corruption in the earth – it is as if he had murdered all mankind. (Surat al-Ma’ida: 32)
Furthermore, polls in countries with large Muslim populations indicate that Muslims oppose the killing of civilians in warfare significantly more than non-Muslims do. People in Muslim countries “roundly reject attacks on civilians. Asked about politically-motivated attacks on civilians, such as bombings or assassinations, majorities in all countries–usually overwhelming majorities–take the strongest position offered by saying such violence cannot be justified at all.”[6]
To avoid this direct problem, some say that the alleged 9/11 hijackers were nominally Muslims. In other words, they were people who called themselves Muslims but who just didn’t follow this one requirement of the Qu’ran. This article doesn’t delve into the carefully cultivated phenomenon called “radical Islam,” but the evidence we have indicates that the men accused of hijacking planes on 9/11 were either not involved at all, or were not even close to being adherents of Islam.
The men accused of hijacking the planes were either not involved or were not Muslims
In the weeks after 9/11, many mainstream news sources reported that the accused hijackers were still alive. These claims were reported by major media sources like The Independent, the London Telegraph and the British Broadcasting Corporation. Although BBC attempted to retract the claims later, the Telegraph reported that it had interviewed some of these men, who the newspaper said had the same names, same dates of birth, same places of birth, and same occupations as the accused.[7]
No other media sources have successfully explained the discrepancies around the reports of the alleged hijackers still being alive. One particularly weak attempt, cited as the primary source at Wikipedia, was an absurd hand-waving piece in Der Spiegel that used “U.S. Historian Daniel Pipes” as the authority.[8] Not mentioned is the fact that Pipes, a second-generation neocon and Project for the New American Century signatory, is arguably the world’s leading Islamophobe.[9]
Most importantly, the “hijackers alive” reports were not investigated by the FBI or the 9/11 Commission. In fact, the Director of the FBI, Robert Mueller, publicly expressed doubts about the identity of the hijackers. Yet to this day there has been no official response to these contradictions despite their high relevance to the overall investigation.
However, we can imagine that these cases were probably the result of stolen identities and some follow-up media statements suggested just that. With the likelihood of stolen identities, and without an official investigation to clarify, we are left with the conclusion that some of the accused men were not involved. It could be that there may have been other people involved who have never been identified, but without facts to go on we cannot say.
The men who appear to have been falsely accused include the brothers Wail and Waleed al Shehri, and Abdulaziz al Omari.[10] The language in the 911CR suggests that al Omari was the most devout of the accused men, in that he “often served as an imam at his mosque in Saudi Arabia.” But since his identity was stolen and he was therefore not involved, we must look to the other accused men for Muslim connections.
Others who appear to be victims of identity theft include Mohand al Shehri, Salem al Hazmi, Saeed al Ghamdi, and Ahmed al Nami. Although the Commission’s report states that al Ghamdi “attended prayer services regularly,” he was also reported to have trained at the Lackland Air Force Base’s Defense Language Institute, which is a fact that does not support his being a religious fanatic with limitless hostility toward the United States. The report also says of al Hazmi that he was “unconcerned with religion.” In any case, these four must be excluded from the oxymoronic label of “Muslim terrorist” because it appears they were falsely accused.
Another of the accused men who the Commission says was “unconcerned with religion” was Satam al Suqami. This description appears to be correct because, according to The Boston Globe, al Saqami liked to sleep with prostitutes, which is a decidedly non-Muslim activity.[11] In Islam, prostitution and other forms of sexual deviancy are forbidden. Therefore, although al Suqami was not reported to be still alive, he was not a Muslim.
In the months and days leading up to 9/11, the alleged hijackers were reported to have drank alcohol heavily in bars, purchased pornographic materials, watched strippers, and paid for lap dances. Needless to say, people who follow the teachings of the Qu’ran (Muslims) do not do any of those things.
As Temple University professor of Islamic Studies, Mahmoud Mustafa Ayoub, said in relation to the alleged 9/11 hijackers – “Islam does not condone killing innocent people in the name of God. Nor can a devout Muslim drink booze or party at a strip club and expect to reach heaven.”[12]
Two of the men were being watched by the CIA for at least twenty months prior to 9/11. These were Nawaf al Hazmi and Khalid al Mihdhar, and they did not follow the Qu’ran either. As reported by the Los Angeles Times, these two were often seen at Cheetah’s, a nude bar in San Diego.
The most glaring examples of non-Muslim behavior, however, were exhibited by the alleged hijacker pilots of American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175. According to the 911CR, Mohammed Atta and Marwan al Shehhi piloted these airliners and crashed them into the WTC towers. Public knowledge about them indicates that they might have been trained at U.S. military facilities, but it is clear that they did not even try to follow the Qu’ran. Frankly, Phillip Zelikow is more of a Muslim than they were.
For one thing, Atta and al Shehhi were known to dress in gaudy jewelry and clothes. Because of this, people thought they were mafia characters. As author Daniel Hopsicker wrote, they wore “Gold jewelry, expensive watches, and silk shirts” and were “Not exactly a description of Islamic fundamentalists.”[13] Additionally, their activities in Florida, in the years prior to 9/11, were closely aligned with those of gunrunners and drug smugglers, which also indicates that they were anything but Muslims.
Atta’s stripper girlfriend, Amanda Keller, said that Atta and al Shehhi “had massive supplies of cocaine” which they restocked whenever needed at one of the flight schools run by Dutch nationals in Florida. Keller said that during the time she dated him, she saw Atta do cocaine himself on multiple occasions.[14] And, of course, Muslims don’t do cocaine or other illicit drugs.Witnesses saw Al Shehhi and Atta drunk at a Hollywood, Florida sports bar. On another occasion in Palm Beach, Atta and Alshehhi were seen spending $1,000 on champagne in only 45 minutes. During the latter escapade, Atta was with a tall busty brunette and Alshehhi was with a short blonde woman. Both women were known locally as high-priced escorts.[15]
A stripper in Las Vegas, Nevada recalled that Marwan al Shehhi was “cheap,” because he paid only $20 for a lap dance. In the summer of 2001, Al Shehhi was apparently also seen in a nude bar in Pompado Beach, Florida. Six exotic dancers who worked there testified to seeing him. At the same time, both al Shehhi and Hamza Alghamdi were witnessed purchasing pornographic video and sex toys from a Florida store. The Wall Street Journal reported that Alghamdi watched a porn video in his hotel room, and others witnessed alleged hijacker Majed Moqed visiting a porn shop on several occasions in the months before 9/11.[16]
This same categorically non-Muslim behavior was also true for Ziad jarrah, the alleged hijacker pilot of Flight 93, which was destroyed in a field in Pennsylvania. Seven months before the attacks, it was noticed that Jarrah “frequented” a strip club in Jacksonville, Florida.[17]
The 911CR says that six of the alleged hijackers lived in Paterson, NJ for up to six months. This included Hani Hanjour, Nawaf al Hazmi, Khalid al Mihdhar, the man mis-identified as Abdulaziz al Omari, and others. Reports put Ziad Jarrah in Paterson as well. The mayor of Paterson, Marty Barnes, certainly noticed them and he made the point of how non-Muslim they were, saying –“Nobody ever saw them at mosques, but they liked the go-go clubs.” [18]
Given that Atta and friends were so far from being Muslims, it actually makes sense that the U.S. government would try, in the days after 9/11, to bolster the political story by adding actual Muslims to their quickly drawn-up list. The real al Omari, for example, was obviously not involved. But the discrepancy between his being an imam and a go-go club aficionado who never went to the mosques would quickly be lost in the post-9/11 clamor for revenge. And the public’s most banal and prejudiced tendencies could be better exploited with hints of Muslim connections, no matter how weak, just as they have been with the anthrax attacks and the ongoing FBI-planned terrorism.
In any case because the alleged hijacker pilots were clearly not Muslims, the deaths caused by the destruction of those planes cannot be attributed to Muslims. This includes the deaths of the airplane passengers and the people in the impact zones of the WTC.
The alleged hijackers were not responsible for most of the deaths on 9/11, if any
The 911CR says that Hani Hanjour, the accused hijacker pilot of American Airlines Flight 77, was the terrorist operation’s most experienced pilot. The official account tells us that he slammed the aircraft into the Pentagon at the first-floor level going over 500 mph. But all the evidence indicates that he was a very poor pilot at best. He repeatedly failed his training courses on single engine aircraft and according to representatives of his flight training schools he had no fundamental pilot skills.[19] Due to these facts, we know that Hanjour could not have flown the plane as alleged. So it doesn’t matter if he was a Muslim.
It is possible that all the planes were commandeered by way of existing remote control technology, which would explain a number of the unanswered questions.[20] Remote piloting could explain why the planes did not squawk the hijack code, why the auto-pilot stayed on during the hijacking process, and how these planes were flown with extreme precision at very high speeds regardless of the poor skills of the alleged pilots. It would also explain how those who planned the attacks could have remained confident of their success, despite having employed unreliable, cocaine-snorting, alcoholic perverts as “hijackers.”
Regardless of who actually flew the planes, we know that most of the deaths on 9/11 were the result of actions which could not have been accomplished by the accused men. Of course, the initial hijackings could be blamed on the alleged, non-Muslim hijackers and one might argue that some passengers and crew members were said to be killed during the hijackings. But so little is known about how the hijackings occurred that it is difficult to know what really happened. The 9/11 Commission could not even say how the alleged hijackers entered the cockpits of any of the four planes, or why the hijack code was not squawked for any of them.
If we examine what was needed to facilitate the attacks, we see that most of the deaths on 9/11 were the result of many things that should not have happened. And none of it could have been accomplished without the involvement of U.S. authorities.
- Pre-9/11 investigations that would have caught the accused men were shut down.
- All the levels of hijacking prevention failed four separate times.
- For several hours, our leaders did nothing to protect the nation.
- The planes should have been intercepted but they were not.[21]
- The planes were flown like guided missiles.
- Three WTC skyscrapers were completely destroyed, and all of them fell through what should have been the path of most resistance.[22]
- Evidence for explosives at the Pentagon was discovered and not explained.
- The debris damage in Pennsylvania indicates that Flight 93 was shot down.
It is reasonable to say, without an extensive inquiry, that Muslims could not have shut down the pre-9/11 investigations. Similarly, they could not have caused the repeated failure of a hijacking prevention system that had been successful for over 20 years. Muslims certainly could not have stopped U.S. leaders from doing their jobs on 9/11, nor could they have disabled the U.S. air defenses or shot down Flight 93.
Additionally, there is no doubt that Muslims were not to blame for delaying and obstructing the investigation into 9/11, during which time the U.S. and its allies had already initiated massacres in the Middle East. The official accounts that were finally generated, that ignored most of the important evidence and are transparently false, are not the work of Muslims either. The murder of millions of people has been falsely justified by way of those official accounts.
Muslims could not have done any of these things. Not even the drug-abusing drunk called Mohammed Atta, who dated strippers, dressed like a gangster and hung out with drug runners, could have done those things.
Moving beyond Islamophobia
We do have clues about who might have been involved though. For example, Florida Governor Jeb Bush showed up at Rudi Dekkers’ flight school in Venice, Florida where Atta and several of the other accused men had trained, within 24-hours after the attacks, to confiscate all the school’s records.[24] Curiously, Jeb and his brother, the President of the United States, had three relatives working for companies within the impact zones of the WTC towers (Craig Stapleton, Jim Pierce, and Prescott Bush Jr).[25]
Dekkers was a pervert just like the accused, non-Muslim men and he was brought up on charges for sexual harassment. Another of the many weird facts about Dekkers was that he claimed to be a New York City cop, and had a plaque on his wall with words to that effect.[26] This might remind us that Bernard Kerik, the “9/11 hero” who led the New York City Police department when it was credited with providing some of the dubious evidence against the accused, not only dressed like a gangster, he was known to have associated with mafia characters. Coincidentally, the same things were said about FBI agent and lead al Qaeda investigator, John O’Neill.
Kerik spent years working in Saudi Arabia, first for the Saudi royal family and then for one of the companies that later was located near the impact zone in the south tower. Interestingly, Kerik was the first person to tell us that explosives were not involved in the destruction of the WTC. Unfortunately, we can’t get follow-up comments from him because he’s now in prison.
There remain many avenues for further investigation into the accused hijackers and who they really were. Could there be a connection between the porn shops and strip clubs that the accused men liked to visit, and covert activities or organized crime? Could those connections lead from places like Las Vegas and Florida to New York City, and shed light on why so many mafia-linked companies were hired to clean-up the WTC site?
Could the links between Atta, Dekkers’ financier Wally Hilliard, and international drug-running have anything to do with creating a pretext for war in Afghanistan, the country that now leads the world in opium production? That certainly would make sense given that the southwest Florida area near Venice, where Dekkers, Atta and the alleged hijackers spent so much time, was home to a long history of CIA and drug trafficking operations.
Two long-time law enforcement officers interviewed by Daniel Hopsicker said they had “witnessed a 40-year long history of CIA-connected covert operations in their area.” They were describing Atta’s home port in early 2001, the Charlotte County Airport. They added that “they believed that the CIA was somehow involved, if not responsible for, the World Trade Center attacks.”[27]
Forty years is not quite right, however, as the history of covert drug operations in that area went back at least 60 years. The tiny Venice Airport, where most of the alleged hijackers trained, originated as the Venice Army Airfield and was the home of the operatives who worked for General Claire Chennault.[28] Civil Air Transport, the successor to Chennault’s Flying Tigers and the world’s largest heroin-trafficking operation at the time, transported the drugs that funded the early covert operations of the CIA, and those airmen worked closely with organized crime while doing so.[29]
For the 12 years prior to 9/11, drug trafficking and terrorist training in the Venice, Florida area was overlooked by the region’s congressional representative, former CIA operative Porter Goss, and its Senator, Bob Graham. It might not be surprising then, to notice that Goss and Graham led the first official inquiry into the 9/11 attacks. They didn’t find much.
Unfortunately, these leads are not being investigated due to continued support for the false claim that the alleged hijackers were adherents of Islam. Such support for the official conspiracy theory also promotes the ongoing Muslim genocide. We don’t know where all this falsehood will lead in the future, but people who seek the truth about 9/11 should move beyond blaming Muslims and get back to useful investigative work.
[1] David Ray Griffin, Was America Attacked by Muslims on 9/11?, information Clearing House, September 8, 2008, http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20722.htm
[2] Glenn Greenwald, The FBI again thwarts its own Terror plot, Salon, Sep 29, 2011, http://www.salon.com/2011/09/29/fbi_terror/
[3] Seymour M. Hersh, What Went Wrong, The New Yorker, October 8, 2001, http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2001/10/08/011008fa_FACT
[4] Kevin R. Ryan, Evidence for Informed Trading on the Attacks of September 11, Foreign Policy Journal, http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2010/11/18/evidence-for-informed-trading-on-the-attacks-of-september-11/
[5] Huda, Muslim Victims of 9/11 Attack: Several dozen Muslims were among the innocent victims, About.com, http://islam.about.com/od/terrorism/a/Muslim-Victims-Of-9-11-Attack.htm
[6] Program on International Policy Attitudes, Muslims Believe US Seeks to Undermine Islam, April 24, 2007, http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/articles/brmiddleeastnafricara/346.php
[7] David Harrison, Revealed: the men with stolen identities, The Telegraph, 23 Sep 2001, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/saudiarabia/1341391/Revealed-the-men-with-stolen-identities.html
[8] Der Spiegel, Panoply of the Absurd, September8, 2003, http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,265160,00.html
[9] Hillary Smith, The Main Purveyors of Islamophobia: Daniel Pipes, The Council for the National Interest, 18 January 2012, http://www.councilforthenationalinterest.org/promoting-islamophobia/the-main-purveyors-of-islamophobia/item/1336-islamophobia%E2%80%99s-main-purveyors-daniel-pipes
[10] 911Research.wtc7.com, Resurrected Hijackers: Suicide Hijackers Identified by the FBI Proclaim Their Innocence, http://911research.wtc7.net/disinfo/deceptions/identities.html
[11] Shelley Murphy and Douglas Belkin, Hijackers Said to Seek Prostitutes, The Boston Globe, October 10, 2001, http://s3.amazonaws.com/911timeline/2001/bostonglobe101001.html
[12] Jody A. Benjamin, Suspects’ actions don’t add up, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, September 16 2001, http://web.archive.org/web/20010916150533/http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/southflorida/sfl-warriors916.story
[13] Daniel Hopsicker, Welcome to Terrorland: Mohamed Atta & the 9-11 Cover-up in Florida, Trine Day; 2004
[15] History Commons Complete 9/11 Timeline, Context of ‘Before September 11, 2001: 9/11 Hijackers Drink Alcohol and Watch Strip Shows, Especially towards Eve of Attacks, http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=a091101beforepinkpony
[17] Jackelyn Barnard, Exclusive: 9/11 Hijacker Stayed at Jacksonville Hotel, First Coast News, Aug 25, 2004, http://www.firstcoastnews.com/news/local/story.aspx?storyid=23296
[18] Evan Thomas, Cracking the Terror Code, Newsweek, October 15, 2001, http://www.wanttoknow.info/011015newsweek
[19] 911Research.wtc7.net, Clueless Super-Pilot, http://911research.wtc7.net/disinfo/deceptions/badpilots.html
[20] Aidan Monaghan, Plausibility Of 9/11 Aircraft Attacks Generated By GPS-Guided Aircraft Autopilot Systems, Journal of 9/11 Studies, October 2008, http://www.journalof911studies.com/volume/2008/AutopilotSystemsMonaghan.pdf
[21] Paul Thompson, The Failure to Defend the Skies on 9/11, History Commons, http://www.historycommons.org/essay.jsp?article=essayairdefense
[22] Frank Legge, Controlled Demolition at the WTC: a Historical Examination of the Case, Journal of 9/11 Studies, May, 2009, http://www.journalof911studies.com/volume/2009/LeggeCDatWTC.pdf
[23] Kevin R. Ryan, Demolition Access to the WTC Towers, found at 911Review.com, http://911review.com/articles/ryan/demolition_access_DonPaul.html
[28] Daniel Hopsicker, The Utimate Hedge?: Venice Airport has a 60-Year History of Drug Trafficking, Mad Cow News, March 8, 2010, http://www.madcowprod.com/03082010.htm
[29] Kevin R. Ryan, Review of American War Machine, by Peter Dale Scott, 911Blogger.com, February 12, 2011, http://911blogger.com/news/2011-02-12/review-american-war-machine-peter-dale-scott
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